Highlights from the Power BI Desktop September 2017 feature summary

16/09/2017

This month there are a couple of exciting new features that caught our eye:

Drill through to another report page

Explain the increase/decrease feature

Drill through to another report page

Yes, Power BI already has the ability to drill down. If you have a report that shows total sales for example, you can drill down to see all that data that makes up that number. But what if you want to look at a particular category of products and see some key information about that category? After you have drilled down from your total sales and have all the underlying data, you can then right click and select Drill Through to look at a particular component in more detail. We've configured this report to allow us to Drill Through on category.

Drill Through for further analysis

Drill Through to see a report on your chosen category

The drill through page allows you to look at the same criteria for each of your categories whenever you Drill Through.

Explain the increase/decrease

When looking at a visualisation of some data showing monthly or annual comparisons you can quickly see how your business has performed across each period compared to the other periods. Until now, to determine why a particular month was better or worse than another month you would need to drill through to the some of the detail and see what you can find to explain the difference. The "explain the increase/decrease feature" allows you to ask Power BI to do the leg work for you. How does it work?

Technical explanation:

"Power BI runs the insights machine learning algorithms over the data and populates a fly-out with charts showing what categories most influenced this increase or decrease."

In plain English - it's magic! Basically, Power BI runs the comparison for you only it does it more quickly, more thoroughly and more accurately than you could ever hope to do it.

This is really useful for seeing what may have caused a spike in your expenses for a given month or what people were buying that drove such a good month for the sales team.